


Clothes Don't Make a Man

by Castillon02



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Agender Character, Gen, Gender Identity, Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:01:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25135060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Castillon02/pseuds/Castillon02
Summary: Bond has always felt like he's just a person, but people keep wanting to put him in gender-shaped boxes.
Comments: 20
Kudos: 40
Collections: 007 Fest Fancreations





	Clothes Don't Make a Man

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: Bond has some internalized angst about his own gender. Agender people are awesome and deserve love and acceptance of who they are, but in this fic Bond struggles to understand his relationship with his gender and his identity in general, and he does a lot of (somewhat fond) monster comparisons in the process. 
> 
> Sexual assault cw: There is a moment when 13-year-old Bond gropes a maid, intending for her to fight back and get him kicked out of school, which she does. 
> 
> Written for the 007 Fest angst table prompts 'isolation' and 'trace.'

When Bond is young, he hears a lot about what “good little boys” do. 

Good little boys do as they’re told---but they’re also rewarded for being a “little scamp.” Sometimes explicitly (a sweetie and a laughing “Don’t tell my other half”) and sometimes implicitly (a spanking, but his parents paying attention to him is always a good thing). 

Good little boys are brave when they have to get their shots. Good little boys don’t cry when Kincade’s dog plays too rough. Good little boys keep a stiff upper lip. 

“Good little boy” is the first role Bond learns to play. He puts it on when he walks out of his bedroom door in the morning, and he takes it off after his parents finish the last bedtime story and kiss him goodnight. 

Sometimes he goes to sleep right away, his eyelids heavy after a day of adventuring on the moors. Other times he throws off his blankets, crawls under the bed, and pretends to be a monster. Monsters don’t have to do anything. Monsters aren’t boys or girls. Monsters are whatever they want to be. 

When Bond plays pretend under the bed, his monster self saves people from ‘the bad guys.’ In these pretends, sometimes his body is an amorphous, acidic blob, swallowing people up and leaving their skeletons behind. Sometimes it’s a lizard bristling with spikes, or a wolf who can belch fire, or a bird who screams loud enough to hurt people and wields a hooked beak like a sickle. Sometimes he’s even a person-shaped monster, but his features are blurred like the staticky snow on the telly, no details allowed. 

“Thanks, Monster,” the grateful citizen might say. But never “Thank you, young man,” because in Bond’s pretends, he never looks like a little boy. 

\---

In primary school, Bond learns that little boys think little girls are gross, that they play games and rough each other up, that anyone who’s the leader can nudge the norms, but not too much. For example, the other boys can be persuaded to give flowers to the girl of their choice, but not to each other, even though girls are meant to be grosser than boys. (Bond is surrounded by idiots who don’t know what logic is.) 

Aunt Charmian is easier to pretend around than his parents were. She leaves him alone for longer, she hasn’t been around little boys for a very long time, and she seems happy to accept any pecularities as the result of grief. 

(Bond shut himself away in the priesthole and cried for his parents, but also for an ending in himself. What role was he meant to inhabit between sun-up and sundown, if not that of a son?) 

At Eton, Bond learns how to play at being a very specific type of English boy who expects to get what he wants. He puts on the stupid accent, he does the stupid traditions, he makes a good showing in the stupid classes, and he ingratiates himself with a gang of stupid rich boys who act like they shit gold bricks instead of a pile of jobbies like everyone else. 

When it all gets to be too much, he stupidly tries to grope a maid. Boys take what they want, after all---there might be an official punishment, but socially, it’s all part and parcel of the same Gets-What-He-Wants-Boy suit. If he goes after a girl who will shove him away and who will never be quiet about it, if when he’s caught he repeats the disgusting boyish things that everyone gossips about in the dormitories, well... Apparently getting sent down is a bad mark on his record, but Aunt Charmian, as well as icily lecturing him about the proper ways to treat a lady, mutters darkly about bad influences and enrolls him in Fettes, “a proper Scottish school.”

Bond doesn’t have to pretend to give a damn about poetry and foxhunting at Fettes. Instead, he joins the golf team and starts a judo club, and his athletic skills are admired instead of looked down on. It’s easier to do well in classes when he isn’t neck-deep in English twats. Fettes is also a co-ed school, which makes things easier; flirting is free and fun, and it’s an important part of his boy-becoming-a-man suit. 

(There’s a spot on the roof for sneaking a smoke; sometimes Bond slips away, a pack of cigarettes in his pocket as an excuse, and he just sits there. Tries to imagine what it would be like to be a person-shaped person instead of a boy-shaped one, his mind tracing the outline of that staticky figure from his childhood imaginings.) 

“What kind of careers are you interested in?” his advisor asks, and Bond thinks, ‘I’d like to be a monster,’ but he says, “The Navy.” 

“Oxford and then the Navy,” his advisor says, nodding, because it doesn’t occur to people at Fettes that enlisting instead of going to university is a possibility.

\--- 

Oxford comes with more freedom, more fucking, fewer expectations. Bond makes a game of charming people, giving them what they want. If he’s a monster, he’s a shapeshifter, now: champagne and roses for one, rough sex for another, sharp banter for someone else. The game gets boring when it’s only girls. What he might be driven to if he’s bored is probably more dangerous than any kind of fucking, so he has sex with whoever he wants, gender be damned. 

One day, Bond intentionally loses a bet to one of his latest conquests, and he finds himself swishing around campus in a dress, makeup on his face, swaying his hips flirtatiously and leaving lip prints on everyone he likes. It would be a terrible disguise if it were one, so it’s nice that it’s not. 

He can never do it again, of course, because James Bond isn’t That Kind of Man, but it’s a fun day while it lasts. 

\--- 

There are all sorts of things that a good sailor is supposed to do. That a good officer is supposed to do. Bond takes the useful ones and leaves the rest, which his superiors enjoy as much as they hate, and which gets him promoted to Commander at an unreasonable age. 

Maybe they thought a leadership position that was more of a desk job would steady him. Instead it makes it easy to jump ship when M poaches him. 

\--- 

A good spy only has to be two things: 1) loyal, and 2) able to get the job done. 

A good spy has to be a bit of a monster.

But Six expects him to be a male monster, a monster who wields his cock and his gun just the same. It can be tiresome. 

Bond doesn’t care. 

This is the high Bond has been chasing all his life: solving the problem, putting arrogant arseholes into the ground, measuring himself against an enemy and coming out on top. It’s the thrill of finally being let off his leash so he can chase and chase and chase until he tackles the answers. And it’s not really what the job’s about, but sometimes he even gets to save people. 

He’s never bored for long. 

The one time he tries to change, really tries to make himself into whatever Vesper needs, it all goes wrong. It turns out they’re both pretenders. It turns out there are some molds he can’t fit himself into. 

He remakes himself. He finishes the job. He keeps going. This is what he lives for. This is what James Bond was meant to do. 

He’ll do anything and be anyone to keep doing this. He’ll wear the 007 suit and die in it if he has to. 

\--- 

(Sometimes, on a tropical beach, he closes his eyes against the sun and the grit, and he lets himself imagine again, playing pretend like a youngster: 

He’s going to die in the suit. The odds are pretty good. But if he doesn’t----

Maybe there will come a day when his identify is his own again, and not Her Majesty’s. A day where he has a place to himself, a house all on its own. No neighbors. Maybe a dog and a cat. A horse? Goats? Animals, anyway. Animals who don’t care what he is.

There will be a garden, and a place to sunbathe, and he can wear whatever clothes he wants, or no clothes at all. 

Perhaps he will wear sundresses, swishing around his hairy thighs. Or perhaps his favorite trousers even though there’s no one around to appreciate how nice they make his arse look. Trousers just for him. 

He can’t quite imagine visitors. There are groups for people like him, he supposes. But he wasn’t born a different gender, he just...didn’t seem to come with one, like the baby-bringing stork had swallowed it up in its beak and left nothing behind but instincts warring between pleasure-seeking and survival. Which is fine. He is what he is. People are what they are. But what are the odds of some gender studies twerp who understands that also understanding the cold realities of espionage? Or of him even being able to welcome someone without slipping into a part he’s played before?

No, no visitors. Just a place of his own. Somewhere a person is just a person. Somewhere a monster can be themself. Somewhere a monster isn’t a monster at all.) 

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't stop thinking about how agender Bond would work in tandem with his performative masculinity, and that's where this came from. Constructive criticism is definitely welcome. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! <3


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